We have a small website which was developed with the default language (‘en’), without paying mind to the language or versioning capabilities of sitecore (ouch!). We simply forgot to set the correct default language at the start of the project.
Now we have an entire content tree of ‘en’ items, when they should be ‘nl-NL’ (it’s a Dutch site). And I am wondering if there is an easy way of changing the language for all items in that tree (that does not involve hacking).
I found this Q&A, but it just talks about setting the default language. I’d like to do that, yes, but I would also like to set the correct language for the existing item(versions).
thoughts?
From what I remember we had a similar problem before. Not with filling a website in the wrong language, but having empty content that should be filled with default english content after creating the new language. What we did was export the language. In your case you could export the English language, create a dutch language and replace all entries in the English XML file that comes out with nl-NL values.
After you’ve done that you could import the language file as the Dutch language and all items are filled.
To me this sounds as the easiest and quickest approach, since you only have to search and replace some xml tags.
Good luck!